Are you wondering what you’ve missed? What trend has passed you by while you were busy getting and keeping customers? When I tell you, you’re going to see everything you do in a new light. How you interact with your customers will change. What you ask them will change; how you ask them will change. The focus of everything you do will change. Are you ready?
It’s all about having your ideal customer choose you, every time, regardless of price.
When you stop and ask yourself “why” you do any of the things you do. This is the answer you will come up with. That’s exactly how it happened to me.
I was frustrated when people automatically assumed that I was involved in advertising because I said that I was in the marketing business. This was so frustrating to me that I decided that I was going to figure out a way to tell them what I did without using the word marketing. So I asked myself the following questions:
- Why did we want to know what the competition was doing?
- Why did we want to know what our market share was?
- Why did we care about the customer and how they perceived our brand?
- Why did we exhibit at trade shows?
- Why did we do all this fancy analysis on pricing?
There was one answer that kept coming up and it was “Because we want our customer to choose US and not the other guy!”
Once I figured this out my entire outlook changed. It suddenly dawned on me that a salesperson hadn’t “sold” me anything since I started using the internet. No matter what the purchase or how high the investment or involvement level, I did my research, came up with my top choices and then I CHOSE the company that best connected with me and focused their entire marketing process on what was important to me.
What every marketer ought to know by now is that the key to getting and keeping profitable customers revolves around managing these four components of your business:
- What is your competitive advantage? What is the one thing that only you can say about your company?
- Who is your ideal customer? What is the profile and demographic of the kind of customer who loves your company and is loyal to your brand?
- What’s important to them when they are buying what you are selling? Specifically, what benefits are they looking for that you consistently deliver on?
- How do you build a system that will get them to choose YOU, every time, regardless of price? In what ways can you be where they want you, at the right price, with the right message and an irresistible offer?
Now that you know the secret, in what ways will your approach to getting and keeping these ideal customers change? How will your survey’s change? Will you ask different questions? In what ways will you use this information to implement strategies that will make YOU the obvious choice for them – regardless of price?
